Something based upon California’s Peer Assistance and Review system should work. Experienced teachers, elected mostly by other teachers (but administrators as well), could, as a panel, review any teacher and would review teachers pointed out by administrators. Then there would be an assistance process for struggling teachers who, if they couldn’t improve, would get kicked out. Yes, teachers booting teachers.

Standardized tests belong nowhere near teacher evaluations. They give incentives for bad teaching while punishing good teaching. Value-added studies of standardized tests, which look at the increases individual teachers have on student scores over the years, are also garbage. Teachers vary widely in performance, year by year. Tests area also not designed to be normalized over the years. Student performance also varies widely on one standardized test versus another.

Standardized tests, like the SAT, also perform poor measurement of student ability. Plenty of Mission kids study all summer long in classes teaching gaming the SAT. Are there abilities any better? No, but they get an extra few hundred points on the SAT, shutting out more deserving students from families who can’t afford or are too ethical to game the system.

I urge you all to look into recent work and lobbying by Stephen Krashen. He does an excellent job of looking into the statistics of test scores, finding how little they really tell.

And, I suppose when you are approached by some childs parent, who attemt t argue the exact same points as a rationale for their child not receiving a failing grade in one of your classes, you would tell them . . . . . what ?

I am shocked, that a professional who so obviously makes widespread use of standardized (by you) in-situ testing, can so readily argue the ineffectivness of testing . . . . When the dust settles on this, it’s not about whether or not testing is one effective tool or not – it’s about WHO authors the test . . . isn’t it ?

Jon, I really don’t like your idea on a peer review panel. I cant believe that teachers would be privy judging individual performance because the closest thing we have today to a teacher peer group (unions) have distanced themselves so far from that concept. From my perspective, the “us v them” mentality is ingrained in teaching culture, and I think serious injustices will be allowed to slide because of it.

Also, if you think there is push back from fiscal-cons on taxes right now, wait until they get the impression that the inmates are running the asylum.

I think it may be time to accept the fact that our state (and Fed perhaps) is too large and complex to run in this capacity. Maybe the state should get out of the business of public school administration, eliminate every state education administrator and act only as a tax collector for the local districts who can then make these performance decisions themselves based on local factors such as student/parent “quality” and socioeconomics.

Jon, I wondered if you read this editorial from the SF Chronicle regarding push back from the unions playing a major role in CA losing out on some Federal funding? What are your thoughts?

From the editorial:

concern that the unions could stall or undermine the teacher-accountability pledge was a recurring theme in the reviews made public Wednesday. The reviewers’ skepticism was well founded. Two-thirds of the California districts had yet to obtain union consent to base part of principal and teacher evaluations on students’ performance.